How to Combine B2B Content Marketing with Paid Traffic

In B2B online marketing, there tends to be two very distinct worlds.

As far as traffic to your website is concerned, there is B2B content marketing and paid traffic.

While you can use both, many companies strictly rely on one or the other. Those companies that do utilize both options tend to keep them completely separate, as well. They have totally different strategies for leads depending on how they end up on their sites.

This is a huge mistake.

3 Ways Content Marketing and Paid Traffic Can Be Used to Increase Leads

Not only is it a good idea to combine your B2B content marketing and paid-traffic strategies, but it’s also 100% necessary.

Unless you are confident that every lead will convert after seeing one of your ads or coming to your site through a search engine, chances are that there will be some overlap. A lead who sees your ad may not convert, but they’ll come back to your site later. If you’re using retargeting – which you absolutely should be – you’ll be bringing back site visitors through paid channels.

So, instead of keeping them distinct, here’s how B2B content marketing and paid ads should work together.

1. Use Your Content and Ads to Inform One Another

One of the biggest problems with treating content marketing and PPC ads as completely different from each other is that you miss a lot of opportunities to improve the assets of both.

For example, any promise you make in an ad that gains clicks should probably inform your lead magnets. Those also depend on the promise of something spectacular to get clicks. Of course, you can use lead magnets at the end of blog posts and as the actual offer in ads.

Likewise, if you’ve found that blog posts around a certain topic bring in a lot of organic traffic, this should also tell you something about the prospects conducting those searches. After they read your blog post, what will they want to learn about next? Is there an opportunity to create an ad, so you can catch those prospects during their next search?

2. Create Content to Replace Your Google Ads

Google Ads should have a spot in every B2B marketers’ toolbox. While you wait for your B2B content marketing efforts to pay off, you can still earn plenty of exposure on the first page of Google by creating high-performing ads and placing well-informed bids.

With that said, you should always strive to create content that ranks on the first page of Google for popular keywords that represent buying intent from your audience.

Far too many marketers create impressive ad campaigns around these kinds of keywords and then put their content-marketing focus elsewhere. As a result, they will always need to pay for that first-page traffic.

Instead, use the last tip to figure out what kinds of content would work best for these high-volume keywords, and then continuously produce content that will help you get on the first page for free. Pillar pages can be great for this because they give you so many opportunities to create this type of content instead of repeating the same post over and over.

Also, don’t forget to turn off your ads the moment you organically rank for a certain keyword. Otherwise, you’ll end up competing against yourself for attention – never a good idea.

3. Find Guest-Posting Opportunities with the Most Potential

Content marketing and PPC ads both share one very important aspect in common: they often depend on other companies’ websites.

Content marketing works best when it involves posting on other sites to earn backlinks and greater exposure. Generally, content marketers try to get their posts published on sites they know their market regularly visits.

The problem is that these sites don’t necessarily represent visitors who are actively looking to purchase. So, while you may earn a backlink, that exposure might not be worth much.

That’s why you should place ads on industry sites, too. Then, once you see where the most conversions are coming from, approach those sites for guest-posting opportunities. This will save you a lot of time you’d otherwise spend with trial-and-error guest posts.  

How to Immediately Increase Conversions for Your B2B Content Marketing

At Hushly, we’re big fans of both B2B content marketing and paid ads, especially when they’re used in tandem to generate more leads.

However, we also know that even when their powers are combined, turning those efforts into qualified leads your sales team can nurture into conversions isn’t always easy.

That’s why we created our platform. Without changing anything on your site or any of your ads, we guarantee that our software will increase your lead-gen and account-based marketing (ABM) leads by 51%.

Contact us today and we’d be more than happy to show you exactly how it works.

3 Essential Landing Page Best Practices to Skyrocket Conversions

In the B2B world, just about every company uses landing pages. It’s almost unheard of to not have at least one or two as part of any modern B2B marketing campaign.

Despite how long they’ve been around and how many other options have come into existence, landing pages still enjoy a reputation for being one of the most cost-effective tools for B2B companies to attract leads and set them up for conversions.

So, if this hasn’t been your experience, if you’re not 100% happy with what you’ve seen thus far, it’s time to learn about the most important landing page best practices.

3 Landing Page Best Practices for More Conversions

While there are a number of different ways you can judge the effectiveness of your landing pages, nothing is as important as conversions. After all, most of you are probably paying for your traffic, so every failed conversion means a higher cost-per-acquisition.

That’s why these 3 landing page best practices are absolutely essential.

1. Check to See What Google Ads Says About Your Landing Page

Chances are that at least some of your paid traffic is coming from Google Ads. If not, add that to your list of landing page best practices to implement right away. Google Ads will give you incredible exposure without having to spend all that time on creating original content for organic traffic.

Another great reason to use Google Ads is because of the feedback they’ll provide. Among other things, this includes what they think of the landing-page experience you offer.

“Google Ads analyzes it through a combination of automated systems and human evaluation” and the result affects the kind of Ad Rank you can hope to achieve.

Obviously, you want to use Google’s feedback to better improve your Ad Rank, but it’s also information you can use to modify landing pages across every other channel you use.

Best of all, because it’s Google, you can be certain that your landing pages are being considered against those of many of your competitors. This makes their input all the more valuable.

2. Shift to Retargeting to Qualified Leads

Without a doubt, one of the best landing page best practices to boost conversions – without making any changes to them – is simply by investing in retargeting.

The reason is fairly simple.

If you rely solely on Google Ads and other paid-traffic sources, it’s extremely likely that many of your prospects aren’t qualified. They may literally be conducting their first ever search to solve the current problem their company is facing. These kinds of prospects may then click on your ad even though they’re nowhere near converting.

With retargeting, your ads are only shown to prospects who have demonstrated a genuine interest in what you have to offer. For example, you could use retargeting to advertise only to prospects who read a certain blog post.

Now, not only do you know they’re interested in your service, but you may also know other important specifics about what their company needs. As a result, you can create hyper-targeted ads that speak to those requirements.

Again, many B2B marketers find that retargeting is all it takes to improve one of their current landing pages’ conversion rates substantially.

3. Show Your Lead What the Future Looks Like

Before another company buys from yours, its decision-makers need to be convinced that your product and/or service will improve their business.

That might seem like a no-brainer, but if your landing pages aren’t earning opt-ins, it might be because they don’t do a good enough job of showing prospects what the future has in store if they work with your company.

Fortunately, you don’t need a magical crystal ball to pull this off. Instead, you could simply include a powerful testimonial at the top of each of your landing pages. This will show prospects of how other companies have benefited from your help.

In your copy, you could include a brief case study, too. This could go into further detail about how your business improved another.

Landing pages that are short-and-sweet have always been in fashion, but the fact is that long copy tends to do better, so don’t be afraid to lengthen yours a bit if it means showing your prospects the future.

Add Our Platform to These Landing Page Best Practices for Even More Conversions

Simply by following the three landing page best practices outlined above, your business should enjoy far greater conversions from these popular marketing assets.

But there’s no reason to stop there.

At Hushly, we’ve created a platform that will increase your ABM and lead-gen conversions by at least 51%. We even guarantee it. Contact us today, and we’ll show you exactly how it works.